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Adventures in Translating Between Cultures and Eras: A Double Launch for The Best China & The Monkey King

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Adventures in Translating Between Cultures and Eras: A Double Launch for The Best China & The Monkey King

Featuring John Minford and Julia Lovell

With a comment by Hu Ying, Jeffrey Wasserstrom moderating

Hosted, remotely, by UC Irvine’s International Center for Writing and Translation, in partnership with the Los Angeles Review of Books and Birkbeck College, University of London, Department of History, Classics, and Archaeology

This event, in which members of UCI’s History Department (Wasserstrom) and East Asian Studies Department (Hu Ying) will play the roles of moderator and discussant, respectively, will highlight the work of two extraordinary translators and scholars of Chinese culture. One is John Minford. He is an emeritus professor at ANU and holds a distinguished position at Hang Seng University in Hong Kong, and he has translated (or co-translated) both classic works of philosophy, including the I Ching (Yi Jing) and Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing), and classic works of literature, such as The Dream of the Red Chamber (aka The Story of the Stone). The other is Julia Lovell. She is a Professor at Birkbeck College, London, and she has translated works by Lu Xun, Yan Lianke, and other major modern writers. Minford’s most recent book is The Best China: Essays from Hong Kong (January 2021), the final volume in a six-part series devoted to Hong Kong literature, while Lovell’s is an abridged translation of Monkey King/Journey to the West (February 2021).

This session, held just after the Year of the Ox begins and just before the Lantern Festival arrives, will be a “double happiness” book launch. It will also, though, use Minford and Lovell’s past and present works as a point of departure for a wide-ranging discussion of the perils and pleasures of trying to convey to international readers the richness and variation of Chinese cultural traditions, decidedly in the plural.

The event is free. To register, click here.

 

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This event is part of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology's Discover the Past events series, open to the public and students. To see the full list of events, visit the Discover the Past web page.

The Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck has a distinguished tradition as an international centre of excellence. We are the only university department in London to include archaeologists, classicists and historians investigating every period from prehistory to the early twenty-first century. Join us to discover the past and engage with the present across continents and cultures.

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